The U.S. Senate election in Pennsylvania between Democratic incumbent Sen. Bob Casey and Republican David McCormick is headed for a statewide recount, as counties continued Wednesday to sort through outstanding ballots and the campaigns jousted over which ones should count.
The Associated Press called the race for McCormick last week, concluding that not enough ballots remained to be counted in areas Casey was winning for him to take the lead.
A noon deadline passed Wednesday for Casey to waive his right to a statewide recount and Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro’s top election official, Secretary of State Al Schmidt, a Republican, announced that preliminary results had triggered a legally required statewide recount.
As of Wednesday, McCormick led by about 28,000 votes out of more than 6.9 million ballots counted — inside the 0.5% margin threshold to trigger an automatic statewide recount under Pennsylvania law….
Adam Bonin, a lawyer representing the Casey campaign in Philadelphia, said Republicans were aggressively and systematically challenging the provisional ballots of registered Democrats, delaying the vote counting process.
“What we are seeing this year is more organized, more disciplined, more directed and more comprehensive than what we saw in 2020,” Bonin said.
McCormick’s campaign consultant, Mark Harris, said large Democratic-controlled counties were dragging out the process by not adding the results of processed ballots to vote totals.
The McCormick campaign was challenging provisional ballots that it is allowed to challenge under the law, Harris said.
“This is clearly an effort to use lawfare to chip away at our lead,” Harris said. “This is not going to work. Dave McCormick is the senator-elect and will be the senator.”
Counties, meanwhile, were busy Wednesday processing tens of thousands of provisional ballots and hearing challenges to some of them by lawyers for Casey, McCormick and the state parties. A provisional ballot is typically cast at a polling place on Election Day and is separated from regular ballots in cases when elections workers need more time to determine a voter’s eligibility to vote….